Intel, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Huawei among top R&D spenders

Among the companies that spend a fortune of their revenue on research and development, Huawei is among the front runners. The recently released annual performance report by Huawei says that the company spent 40.8 yuan in research and development in 2014. This amounts to $6.6 billion, a figure that is too high, comparatively, even from the perspectives of Intel and Microsoft.

The report further notes that the company has spent 190 billion Yuan only on research and development in the past one decade. The amount of money spent by Huawei on research is much more than what other companies of that size spend on research to build new products and to improve their existing products. While it leaves out similar sized companies far behind in spending on R&D, it still trails Intel, Microsoft, Google and Amazon.

Coming to percentage of revenue being spent on R&D, Huawei is spending quite high in terms of percentage of total revenue on the research and development work – that is 14.2% . Microsoft spends 12% of its total revenue. Amazon spends 10.4% of total revenue generated – on research and development while Google is the highest spender at 14.9% of the total revenue generated.

Other tech companies with lower revenue, like Facebook and Twitter, spend much more in the field of R&D. Facebook reported 21% of revenue spent on R&D while Twitter was even higher at 49% of total revenue earned.

The CEO of Huawei, Ken Hu, told investors that the company intends to spend $60 million of its 2015 R&D budget to develop and explore 5G technology, the next generation mobile technology that will hit UK by 2020 and is expected to be in full swing in the US by 2025.

Arun Kumar is obsessed with technology, especially the Internet. He deals with the multimedia content needs of training and corporate houses. He also offers online training for Business English. Follow him on Twitter @PowercutIN